JEAN GREY's X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX Awakening Explained

By George Marston, Newsarama Contributor December 7, 2017 10:23am ET

Credit: 20th Century Fox

X-Men: Dark Phoenix writer/director Simon Kinberg has revealed some new details about how Jean Grey will come into contact with the Phoenix Force in the film. As it turns out, the story is fairly similar to how it happened in comic books, involving a jaunt into space and some heavy solar flares.

“Jean absorbs those solar flares and then hurls them back out into space,” director Simon Kinberg toldEntertainment Weekly of the scene shown in some just-released concept art. “That’s what triggers, awakens, creates this Phoenix force and voice inside her. What appears to the world to be another heroic victory by the X-Men in saving stranded people in space we realize is the the thing that begins the unraveling of Jean and the unraveling of secrets Charles told her.”

Credit: 20th Century Fox

This sequence will also introduce Jessica Chastain's mysterious and as-yet-unnamed villain.

“They might be the biggest set pieces we’ve ever done,” added producer Hutch Parker. “The space [set piece] is one of the biggest things we’ve ever done. Overall visual effects, scale of action and spectacle, it’s probably the biggest we’ve done but much more in the service of these characters and their conflict than for scale sake.”